Dark Rivers of the Heart

“No, Baer. Bess Baer. What’s your name?”

“My faithful Indian sidekick calls me Kemosabe.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like shit,” he said.

“Well, that’s what ‘Kemosabe’ means.”

“Are we ever going to stop?”

“Not while we have cloud cover.”

“What’ve clouds got to do with anything?”

“Satellites,” she said.

“You are the strangest woman I’ve ever known.”

“Just wait.”

“How the hell did you find me?”

“Maybe I’m psychic.”

“Are you psychic?”

“No.”

He sighed and closed his eyes. He could almost imagine that he was on a merry-go-round. “I was supposed to find you.”

“Surprise.”

“I wanted to help you.”

“Thanks.”

He let go of his grip on the world of the waking. For a while all was silent and serene. Then he walked out of the darkness and opened the red door. There were rats in the catacombs.

* * *

Roy did a crazy thing. Even as he was doing it, he was amazed at the risk he was taking.

He decided that he should be himself in front of Eve Jammer. His real self. His deeply committed, compassionate, caring self that was never more than half revealed in the bland, bureaucratic functionary that he appeared to be to most people.

Roy was willing to take risks with this stunning woman, because he sensed that her mind was as marvelous as her ravishing face and body. The woman within, so close to emotional and intellectual perfection, would understand him as no one else ever had.

Over dinner, they had not found the key that would open the doors in their souls and let them merge, which was their destiny. As they were leaving the restaurant, Roy was concerned that their moment of opportunity would pass and that their destiny would be thwarted, so he tapped the power of Dr. Kevorkian, which he’d recently absorbed from the television in the Learjet. He found the courage to reveal his true heart to Eve and force the fulfillment of their destiny.

Behind the restaurant, a blue Dodge van was parked three spaces to the right of Eve’s Honda, and a man and woman were getting out of it, on their way to dinner. They were in their forties, and the man was in a wheelchair. He was being lowered from a side door of the van on an electric lift, which he operated without assistance.

Otherwise, the parking lot was deserted.

To Eve, Roy said, “Come with me a minute. Come say hello.”

“Huh?”

Roy walked directly to the Dodge. “Good evening,” he said as he reached under his coat to his shoulder holster.

The couple looked up at him, and both said, “Good evening,” with a thread of puzzlement sewn through their voices, as if trying to recall where they had met him before.

“I feel your pain,” Roy said as he drew his pistol.

He shot the man in the head.

His second round hit the woman in the throat, but it didn’t finish her. She fell to the ground, twitching grotesquely.

Roy stepped past the dead man in the wheelchair. To the woman on the ground, he said, “Sorry,” and then he shot her again.

The new silencer on the Beretta worked well. With the February wind moaning through the palm fronds, none of the three shots would have been audible farther than ten feet away.

Roy turned to Eve Jammer.

She looked thunderstruck.

He wondered if he had been too impulsive for a first date.

“So sad,” he said, “the quality of life that some people are forced to endure.”

Eve looked up from the bodies and met Roy’s eyes. She didn’t scream or even speak. Of course, she might have been in shock. But he didn’t think that was the case. She seemed to want to understand.

Maybe everything would be all right after all.

“Can’t leave them like this.” He holstered his gun and pulled on his gloves. “They have a right to be treated with dignity.”

The remote-control unit that operated the wheelchair lift was attached to the arm of the chair. Roy pressed a button and sent the dead man back up from the parking lot.

He climbed into the van through the double-wide sliding door, which had been pushed to one side. When the wheelchair completed its ascent, he rolled it inside.

Assuming that the man and woman were husband and wife, Roy planned the tableau accordingly. The situation was so public that he didn’t have time to be original. He would have to repeat what he had done with the Bettonfields on Wednesday evening in Beverly Hills.

Tall lampposts were spaced around the parking lot. Just enough bluish light came through the open door to allow him to do his work.

He lifted the dead man out of the chair and placed him faceup on the floor. The van was uncarpeted. Roy was remorseful about that, but he had no padding or blankets with which to make the couple’s final rest more comfortable.

He pushed the chair into a corner, out of the way.

Outside again, while Eve watched, Roy lifted the dead woman and put her into the van. He climbed in after her and arranged her beside her husband. He folded her right hand around her husband’s left.

Both of the woman’s eyes were open, as was one of her husband’s, and Roy was about to press them shut with his gloved fingers when a better idea occurred to him. He peeled up the husband’s closed eyelid and waited to see if it would remain open. It did. He turned the man’s head to the left and the woman’s head to the right, so they were gazing into each other’s eyes, into the eternity that they now shared in a far better realm than Las Vegas, Nevada, far better than any place in this dismal, imperfect world.

He crouched at the feet of the cadavers for a moment, admiring his work. The tenderness expressed by their positions was enormously pleasing to him. Obviously, they had been in love and were now together forever, as any lovers would wish to be.

Eve Jammer stood at the open door, staring at the dead couple. Even the desert wind seemed to be aware of her exceptional beauty and to treasure it, for her golden hair was shaped into exquisitely tapered streamers. She appeared not windblown but windadored.

“It’s so sad,” Roy said. “What quality of life could they have had — with him imprisoned in a wheelchair, and with her tied to him by bonds of love? Their lives were so limited by his infirmities, their futures tethered to that damned chair. How much better now.”

Without saying a word, Eve turned away and walked to the Honda.

Roy got out of the Dodge van and, after one last look at the loving couple, closed the sliding door.

Eve was waiting behind the wheel of her car, with the engine running. If she had been frightened of him, she would have tried to drive away without him or would have run back to the restaurant.

He got in the Honda and buckled his safety harness.

They sat in silence.

Clearly, she intuited that he was no murderer, that what he had done was a moral act, and that he operated